A Hologram for the King

Synopsis

How far will you go? To find yourself.

Alan Clay, a struggling American businessman, travels to Saudi Arabia to sell a new technology to the King, only to be challenged by endless Middle Eastern bureaucracy, a perpetually absent monarch, and a suspicious growth on his back.

Tom Hanks' great performance and the film's multiple plot threads almost distract you from noticing just how shallow and meandering this movie is. I'm being harsh though, I actually enjoyed it despite how light weight it was.

Based on the Dave Eggers novel, Tom Hanks is Alan Clay a man that has been going through a few stumbling blocks in his personal and professional life. He's a salesman that finds himself in Saudi Arabia facing possibly another huge defeat as he attempts to sell the Saudi government a holographic conferencing software by pitching it directly to the king. So personal/business crisis, desperately wants a fresh start, a whole new look on life, yadda yadda yadda, the…

Writer-director Tom Tykwer adapted his latest dramedy from Dave Eggers' 2012 novel, a finalist for the National Book Award. It's a tale set in 2010 against the backdrop of the Great Recession, starring Tom Hanks as Alan Clay, a corporate salesman recently displaced, divorced and discouraged by the financial crisis. He was once a high-powered executive with Schwinn Bicycle, but now he's selling holographic remote conferencing equipment for an I.T. specialist called Relyand.

As the film opens, Clay arrives at the Hyatt Jeddah with hopes of making a pitch directly to the Saudi Arabian King. In fact, his job and his ability to pay college tuition for his daughter…

Well, the early word from America was right, sadly. It has nothing to do with the original cartoon - there's only one musical number, Tom Hanks can't even be bothered to dye his hair, and who on Earth thought Tom Hanks would be good casting as Jem? On the plus side, replacing the Misfits with the entire nation of Saudi Arabia works better than expected.

It's supposed to be a dry comedy, but besides the dryness of the desert there is nothing really funny. If you think it as a familiar drama it's very shallow, the letters between father and daughter don't give much information. Maybe the best part in this movie struggling to figure out its genre is the romance, but it's just a few minutes in the end.